Killing Them Softly Review: The Middle-Management Mob

I wouldn’t make huge claims for Killing Them Softly. It’s more B movie than masterpiece. Maybe if it had been shot 60 years ago with Richard Widmark and Victor Mature, and you stumbled across it late one night on TCM, you might think it was one of the greatest movies you’d ever seen, nasty and underrated. You’d be all, “Even more than The Big Heat, Killing Them Softly represents the true ur-noir,” while your friends rolled their eyes. But if you pay $12 to see Killing Them Softly in a theater, thinking you’re going to see A-list star Brad Pitt in a small-scale, smartish Oscar contender, which is more or less how it’s being marketed—a grittier, more violent The King’s Speech, say—you’ll likely be underwhelmed.

The reality is that Killing Them Softly falls into cinema’s vast upper-middle ground of okayness. A terrific cast, which also includes James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, and—for only five seconds—Sam Shepard, tackles a somewhat slack, occasionally tense, intermittently amusing script about a heist gone wrong and its ripple effect on an underworld ecosystem. (The cast is virtually all male. The most significant female role is Lianara Washington’s “Hooker,” followed by Shannon Brewer’s “Bar Patron #2.”) The writer-director is Andrew Dominik, who five years ago directed Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The new picture should be better than it is, but if you can make an allowance for that shortfall—and isn’t that what most art ultimately asks from us: a generous heart?—there are rewards, especially if you like seeing people getting the snot beat out of them and taking bullets to the brain.

Pitt, who has a funny way with exasperation, is excellent as the gangster equivalent of a middle-management troubleshooter (literally). He may have a more exotic line of work than most of us, but he still has to suffer the incompetence of colleagues above and below him on the flow chart. In that, Killing Them Softly returns to the borderline satiric mob-as-metaphor-for-America territory that the Godfather films staked out beneath the pulp-Shakespearean cut of Michael Corleone’s suits.

Michael: My father is no different than any other powerful man—any man who’s responsible for other people, like a senator or a president.

Kay: You know how naïve you sound? Senators and presidents don’t have men killed.

Michael: Oh, who’s being naïve, Kay?

(Hmmm. Perhaps that exchange from the first film is a little heavier-handed than I remembered it, but nitpicking The Godfather is like nitpicking The White Album. True, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” could have been cut—and “Piggies,” ugh—but as Paul McCartney once said, “It’s great. It sold. It’s the bloody Beatles White Album, so shut up.”)

The two great post-Godfather mob narratives, GoodFellas and The Sopranos, brought fresh approaches to the genre—anthropological on the one hand, psychological on the other. Strictly speaking, Killing Them Softly isn’t about the Sicilian-American Mafia—its characters are mutt thugs—but otherwise it’s an episode from The Godfather replayed as dark comedy and further down the corporate ladder; it’s the mob’s Office Space as opposed to its Wall Street.

On occasion the new film’s broader intentions are pointed out with perhaps too much clarity: the story is set during the fall 2008 financial implosion and presidential campaign, as Dominik establishes with several cinematic elbows to the ribs. But Pitt’s final, hard-bitten soliloquy, a paean to bottom lines everywhere, ends the film on a high note. I won’t give it away, but the last line is nearly as choice a summation of the movie’s concerns as “Nobody’s perfect” was for Some Like It Hot.